BSD & Darwin Archive

Via Ivan Voras' blog (yes a few days late....but this place needs more BSD news). Michael Dexter of CFT has published a tutorial on FreeBSD's upcoming type 2 hypervisor known as BHyVe. The article guides the reader through the procedures to configure, build & boot a hypervisor capable host and guest system. BHyVe currently only supports Intel's x86 virtualization hardware & the project itself is still currently under early development.

Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying -- at least I've said it many times -- that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'

The first BETA build of the 9.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available. One of the many new features in 9.0 that needs thorough testing is the new installer, so fresh installs on test systems are being encouraged. Ivan Voras has taken the time to thoroughly document all the 9.0 changes at his web site.

"FreeNAS is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD and, as its name implies, designed for networked storage. The project recently celebrated the release of FreeNAS 8, which racked up some 43,000 downloads in the first 48 hours after its release. I caught up with Josh Paetzel, director of IT at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS 8, to talk about the current state of the OS, what lies ahead for it, and the relationship to FreeNAS 0.7."

This release supports a much larger variety of hardware and multiprocessor systems than previous releases, thanks to updates of ACPI and APIC and ACPI interrupt routing support. Hammer volumes can now deduplicate volumes overnight in a batch process and during live operation. The 'hammer dedup-simulate' command can be used to estimate space savings for existing data. DragonFly now uses gcc 4.4 as the default system compiler, and is the first BSD to take that step. DragonFly now offers significant performance gains over previous releases, especially for machines using AHCI or implementing swapcache(8).

"The drought of those who speak without depending on slides has ended at the 12th Australian national Linux conference. Last evening, Marshall Kirk McKusick, a well-known BSD hacker, took those assembled down a slightly different track - after all, this is a Linux conference - with his narrative history of BSD. And what a rollicking ride it was! And the venue for his talk could hold only 100 people. He based his talk on notes he had made while travelling through Australia on a train in 1986 - he was a keynote speaker at the now-defunct Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group conference in 1986."

The 2.8.2 release of DragonFly BSD is now available, featuring significant advances in multi-processor performance based on DragonFly's signature soft token locks. It also includes many feature advancements including: pf from OpenBSD 4.2, the Wifi stack from FreeBSD and DataMapper from NetBSD (with significant enhancements). This release also marks the return of the GUI image. See the release notes for full details.

DragonFly BSD 2.6.1 has been released. "There are numerous big-ticket features in this release as found in the release notes, plus a ton of stability and performance work."

The DragonFly 2.4 release was released just today. One can choose from a bare-bones CD ISO, a DVD ISO that includes an X environment, and a bare-bones bootable USB drive image. In addition, this is the first time DragonFlyBSD has had a 64-bit ISO. 64-bit support is stable, but there will only be limited pkgsrc support in the current release. All versions of the release can all be downloaded from one of the many mirrors.

It seems like the DesktopBSD project's future is at stake due to a lack developers and time. "Hello everyone, sorry for not keeping in touch with you guys for quite a while," main developer Peter Hofer writes, "Truth is, I find myself having less and less time for DesktopBSD these days. In addition, my interests have shifted quite a bit since I started working on it in 2004 (thinking of it, that's almost 5 years ago now...). As a result, I don't really feel that I can make DesktopBSD progress steadily and significantly on my own. Unfortunately, there are no other active developers nor does it seem like there are any who would be interested in contributing." While the project is not dead yet, there will be no major changes or bugfixes for the upcoming 1.7 release, and it could very well be the project's last release.

Th DragonFly BSD team has released DragonFly BSD 2.2. The biggest improvement in this release is that the HAMMER filesystem is considered production ready, but there is a whole boatload of other improvements as well.

Most of you will know that the underlying core set of components of Mac OS X and the iPhone operating system are released under the Apple Public Source License, an FSF-approved open source license. Few of you, however, will have actually used Darwin in any other form than Mac OS X or the iPhone OS. Despite numerous projects attempting so, Darwin has never gained any significant traction apart from Apple's own interest. The PureDarwin project tries to rise from the ashes of the OpenDarwin project, and has just released a Christmas developer preview.

Matthew Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD 2.0. Also HAMMER filesystem is released with the new DragonFly. Read the full Release Notes.

An ancient (at least 33 years old) stack-overflow bug has been discovered and fixed in yacc, thanks to a new malloc() implementation by Otto Moerbeek. More info and a complete description of the bug can be found here.